The conversation

fragmedeHNSource author
Business & incomeExperience excerpt · English

The crazy pills you are taking is that thinking people have anything to prove to you

The crazy pills you are taking is that thinking people have anything to prove to you. The C compiler that Anthropic created or whatever verb your want to use should prove that Claude is capable of doing reasonably complex level of making software. The problem is people have egos, myself included. Not in the inflated sense, but in the "I built a thing a now the Internet is shitting on me and I feel bad" sense. There's fundcli and nitpick on my GitHub that I created using Claude. fundcli looks at your shell history and suggests places to donate to, to support open source software you actually use. Nitpick is a TUI HN client. I've shipped others. The obvious retort is that those two things aren't "real" software; they're not complex, they're not making me any money. In fact, fundcli is costing me piles of money! As much as I can give it! I don't need anyone to tell me that or shit on the stuff I'm building. The "open secret" is that shipping stuff is hard. Who hasn't bought a domain name for a side project that didn't go anywhere. If there's anybody out there, raise your hand! …

Original discussionOpenClaw Is Changing My Life513 source comments · at import
2

What was this responding to?

Parent context · original excerpt

AE
aeldidiHN

There's an odd trend with these sorts of posts where the author claims to have had some transformative change in their workflow brought upon by LLM coding tools, but also seemingly has nothing to show for it. To me, using the most recent ChatGPT Codex (5.3 on "Extra High" reasoning), it's incredibly obvious that while these tools are surprisingly good at doing repetitive or locally-scoped tasks, they immediately fall apart when faced with the types of things that are actually difficult in software development and require non-trivial amounts of guidance and hand-holding to get things right. This can still be useful, but is a far cry from what seems to be the online discourse right now. As a real world example, I was told to evaluate Claude Code and ChatGPT codex at my current job since my boss had heard about them and wanted to know what it would mean for our operations. Our main environm…

Full original

Community replies 0

No community replies yet. Add your perspective.

Replies from the source 2

Direct replies available in this import. Original-language excerpts.

V1
v1neHN

If people make extraordinary claims, I expect extraordinary proofs… Also, there is nothing complex in a C compiler. As students we built these things as toy projects at uni, without any knowledge of software development practices. Yet, to bring an example for something that's more than a toy project: 1 person coded this video editor with AI help: https://github.com/Sportinger/MasterSelects

Full original
AE
aeldidiHN

> The C compiler that Anthropic created or whatever verb your want to use should prove that Claude is capable of doing reasonably complex level of making software. I don't doubt that an LLM would theoretically be capable of doing these sorts of things, nor did I intend to give off that sentiment, rather I was more evaluating if it was as practical as some people seem to be making the case for. For example, a C compiler is very impressive, but its clear from the blog post[0] that this required a massive amount of effort setting things up and constant monitoring and working around limitations of Claude Code and whatnot, not to mention $20,000. That doesn't seem at all practical, and I wonder if Nicholas Carlini (the author of the Anthropic post) would have had more success using Claude Code alongside his own abilities for significantly cheaper. While it might seem like moving the goalpost,…

Full original
Continue on Hacker News

Respect different perspectives. Share concrete experiences.

Sign in to post, reply, repost, and quote.